5 Benefits of Using Salesforce CPQ

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Providing accurate, timely and consistent pricing for customers often makes the difference between a closed-lost and closed-won deal. It also impacts satisfaction and loyalty, which can lead to long-term relationships and improved sales growth.

The process of “Configure, Price and Quote (CPQ)” can be complex in many organizations, especially for manufacturers with vast product lines. So how then do you manage pricing and quoting efficiently in order to serve prospects and customers more effectively?

The answer lies in Salesforce Sales Cloud and CPQ. While many customers can achieve an automated pricing and quoting system by maximizing standard Sales Cloud CRM functionality, other customers require the use of a more sophisticated tool such as CPQ.

This article covers those situations when a CPQ tool, such as Salesforce CPQ, is needed.

There are many reasons to automate and modernize your pricing and quoting software, including:

Most CPQ software options on the market today are designed with proprietary goals in mind, which greatly slow down the implementation process.

Salesforce CPQ was developed from day one using Salesforce “objects,” and relying on this native architecture and flexibility to make it much faster to implement and easier to maintain.

The speed of implementation and flexibility leads to better user adoption and lower total cost of ownership.

2. Robust configuration capabilities

When selling, up-selling or cross-selling, most businesses build groups of products or services. However, sometimes products and services, and their components, are aggregated to form the product or service the customer wants. Or, products and services are grouped into packages and bundles.

Salesforce CPQ can handle the configuration of these types of products and services very well.

3. Easily create price books and discount tiers

At every business, different products, services, packages and bundles have different prices. Tiered pricing and discounts also may be available based on certain volumes.

Pricing may be based on price books and established price lists. In other cases, pricing may be built-up based on costs, plus mark-up or gross margin. The calculations can be extensive and complex.

A leading CPQ tool such as Salesforce’s needs to facilitate the pricing and discounting scenarios and calculations for customer orders.

4. Quickly build Quotes using templates

Building customer Quotes requires the use of templates, which must be supported by your CPQ software. This enables you to present a streamlined, consistent document with all the necessary components. Salesforce has some excellent templates that makes it easy to get quotes in customer hands quickly.

Also, when quoting products and services, businesses need to tell the customer when the products and services will be delivered to the customer. This may require an integration with another system that will provide “Available to Promise” date(s) for the quoted products. These integrations work well with Sales Cloud CRM and Salesforce CPQ.

5. Automate contract execution

In some cases, the Quote is executed, using DocuSign, Echosign or other tool and becomes the contract. In other cases, companies use proposals and have proposal templates which can also be automated in the CPQ tool.

Businesses that need contracts can have contracts automated and their approvals completed in the CPQ tool. Contract signature can be automated using DocuSign, Echosign or another esignature tool.